Security is an increasingly important element in twenty-first century office environments. This increased focus has lead to multiple security protocols for both transporting data securely and for forcing users of technological devices to identify themselves in some way for the purpose of authenticating or authorizing them to use the device.
In the imaging device industry, the first explorations into security largely involved requiring a password to change the imaging device's configuration. Later, protocols such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) were developed to allow control over the actions of any individual workstation on a network. The imaging device industry adopted many of these protocols for securing imaging device operation.
However, these protocols have been global in nature, as they provide blanket coverage for a device, either every function of an imaging device requires a particular security protocol or no function does. Additionally, these protocols often require information to be entered at the imaging device that many older imaging devices are not capable of providing, such as character entry. This has allowed many simpler security methods, such as Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) to survive, as many older imaging devices contained number pads. As a result, imaging devices are often either under-secured, with a global PIN number to protect every feature, or over-secured, requiring complex passwords for even basic functions.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art of imaging devices to customize the manner in which these devices can be secured, as both imaging devices and security protocols have grown more complex and provide more features than ever before. Administrators should be able to loosely secure basic functions of an imaging device while providing meaningful security for the more cost-sensitive functions of imaging devices. Naturally, any improvements along such lines should further contemplate good engineering practices, such as relative inexpensiveness, stability, ease of implementation, low complexity, unobtrusiveness, etc.